New Zealand noise-guru Bruce Russell has taken some time away from his busy schedule running the Corpus Hermeticum megacorporation and recording with The Dead C and A Handful of Dust to release this solo recording. "Maximalist Mantra Music" perfectly describes the improvized clatter and guitar feedback wrestled into a hypnotic drone. So we'll just leave it at that, well, except to say this this is one of Andee's current drone faves.
Dead C main man Bruce Russell's latest solo record is a gorgeous slab of gurgling textures and humming buzzing drones. Built from a seven meter pre-recorded tape loop and slowed down thumb piano, these two lengthy pieces build from rich, soothing foghorn like tones into shimmering washes of high end feedback and rumbling clatter. Really, really beautiful and much less abrasive than a lot of Russell's work.
In the 70s, Robert Rutman began tinkering around with steel stringed instruments and founded the Steel Cello Ensemble, which specialized in lengthy sonorous drones not far from the bowed metal work of Organum or the delicate sound sculptures of Harry Bertoia. "Zuuhh!! Muttie Mum!!" is a collection of 1998 recordings that featured Rutman, Rudi Mose (of Einsturzende Neubauten and Die Haut), Matthias Bauer, and Carsten Tiedemann. Rutman's steel instruments have a surprising dynamism that can achieve spindly gossamer textures as well as earth moving bass resonances. Excellent stuff.
Thankfully, the original version of Walter Ruttmann's "Weekend" is presented here in its entirety, or else there would be relatively little context for the remixes from DJ Spooky, Mick Harris, Ernst Horn, John Oswald, To Rococo Rot, and Klaus Buhlert. "Weekend" was released a few years back on musique concrete label Metamkine's "Cinema For The Ear" series (which also included work from Luc Ferrari, Ralf Wehowski, Bernhard Gunter). Ruttmann's fractured cut 'n' paste collage of street sounds, rhythmic tappings, musical scales, and political speeches were years ahead of the musique concrete techniques of Pierre Schaeffer/Pierre Henry. Composed on an optical sound film using the so-called tri-ergon technique, "Weekend" was presented as a radically innovative radio piece, but was only broadcast once. This definitely remains one of those historical artifacts that is still fascinating to listen to.
And with the exception of the Mick Harris remix (which illogically includes his usual drum machine plod), the remainder of the disc presents some downright decent reinterpretations of the Ruttmann piece.
Two brothers from Humboldt County are RV Paintings - one is Brian Pyle, whose name should probably strike a chord as one of the principals in Starving Weirdos and recently has been generating some impressive work under his solo Ensemble Economique moniker; the other is Jon Pyle, who occasionally makes a guest appearance in the Weirdos but also operates in Nudge with Honey Owens, Paul Dickow, and Brian Foote. For all of the method acting from the brothers Pyle in getting stoned and jamming, they have been remarkably consistent and consistently good in all of their ruminations, with RV Paintings probably the best that they've mustered. The RV Paintings debut on Root Strata is three years out but is still a timeless, gorgeous dronesmear of bowed metals and elongated guitar; this was followed by a well-suited split with Taiga Remains on Blackest Rainbow, and now, they've got this stunner on Helen Scarsdale.
RV Paintings speak about, to, and from their own immediate surroundings: the moss, mushrooms, and mycelium of the awe-inspiring redwood forests, the heavy fog that hangs at the coast and from their bongs, and the weightiness of the Pacific Ocean just off to the west. The title Samoa Highway gives the impression that the two brothers were on their own trip during a cold, wintery day, gazing off to the southwest and pondering the warmer climate of American Samoa. But no, the Samoa Highway is located in Humboldt County, connecting Eureka with the small community of Samoa on the other side of the bay which was thought to resemble that of Pago Pago in the mid-19th Century. It's also the bridge that would get you to the Arcata/Eureka Airport.
So, the album begins with field recordings of airplanes lifting off on the jawdropping track "Millions," as sitar-like harmonics and ghostly, levitating drones emanate from the distance. It's a perfectly narcotized smear of echo and drift, hanging in space as the remnants of a particularly lucid dream or the foggy headspace from an afternoon of smoking pot and staring at the sun. This is a track that could spiral onward forever. So nice! Samoa Highway continues with "Mirrors" driven by melancholy looped melody from a cello that dissolves into a flurry of shimmered guitar fuzz, whose shoegazed mantra has been submerged under centuries of felled trees and lichens. Cyclical patterns of samples from dark yet pastoral orchestral passages rounds out the album. If it weren't for the delicate freeform clamor of the drumkit, tracks such as this wouldn't be that far removed from the 'pop ambient' cuts by Gas. Citations of Taj Mahal Travellers, Organum, Grouper, Barn Owl, and The Caretaker certainly hit the mark. Music for airports? More like Music for California airports! Fuck yeah!
And a download coupon is tucked within the sleeve as well!
The legend beneath the liner notes inside this disc from Starving Weirdos offshoot RV Paintings reads "Jam Nature!!!" Not sure whether it's a command or a description of their process, but just like the music they make, those words could just as easily come from the twisted musical minds of the Jewelled Antler Collective. Which is not all that surprising really. When we first heard the Starving Weirdos, what struck us was their deft blend of abstract found sounds, and improvised noisemaking. Anyone can sit on the floor with a bunch of instruments and fuck around, but only a handful can make magic.
This trio does just that on Trinity Rivers, utilizing the usual array of sound making devices, but incorporating some less likely devices as well, including most notable glasses and "fog-like layers". And it's those two elements that go the farthest in defining the unique sound of Trinity Rivers. The singing sounds of rubbed glass, make everything glisten and sparkle, a breathtakingly delicate shimmer that spreads out over the proceedings like the morning sun peaking over the tops of the trees. Beneath it, plenty of drones and whirs float and drift, as well as dense little flurries of rhythmic tangle. But no matter where the 'Paintings take their sound, it always seems to return to the tranquil drift and shimmer of the glass. The second track begins with a bang, a huge dense cloud of insect like buzz and intertwined with dizzying loops and hiccuping pulses, a swirling sonic chaos with a soft melodic center, barely audible through the buzz and fuzz, but by the end it's drifted back to the glassy glimmer of the first track.
The final track also starts out intense, with strange rhythmic guitar and deep droning swells, before fading into a bleary eyed foggy ambience, the sounds of gulls and lapping waves, hovering beneath wispy clouds of chimes and peals of high end skree, before gradually devolving into a slow fading stretch of hypnotic hand drums,
Released on Jefre Cantu-Ledesma's (of Tarentel) Root Strata label, packaged in a gorgeous black and silver metallic cardstock sleeve with a printed insert.
This is the second pressing for the S.E.T.I. "Above Black" album, originally released in 1998 as part two in a trilogy of paranoiac / isolationsist sound constructions that include "Knowledge" (1995) and "Pod" (2000). Throughout this series, S.E.T.I. (aka Andrew Lagowski who spent time in the early IDM scene with recordings for GPR, and who worked on Lustmord's apocalyptic ambient masterpiece "Heresy" as well) crafts beguiling soundtracks mired in the mythologies of contact with extra-terrestrial beings, both optimisistic and conspiratorial. The title "Above Black" comes from a book of the same name authored by Dan Sherman, a former agent for the NSA, who while on active duty in the US Air Force claimed to have firsthand evidence of the US government's dealings with alien lifeforms. Lagowski may have genuine allegiances with Sherman's claims, but wisely sites his sound productions within the realm of sci-fi metaphor. The source material for "Above Black" appears to be shortwave radio transmissions, in particular the enigmatic repetitions and crackling bleches from utility signals. Whether they overtly function as voice frequency telegraphy, differential global positioning, or air controller communication, it's not a big leap that the intrinsic mysteriousness of these transmissions across the shortwave band are part of some conspiracy. Lagowski accentuates these references through a well-designed sound-narrative aiming for psychological tension and punctuated with shivering electrical drones, bursts of garbled communications, and distant cracklings from the ether.
"Pod" is the final installment to Andrew Lagowski's alien trilogy, which has dealt with the secrecy surrounding extra-terrestrial intelligence and the so-called Grey Projects of research & development of the defense applications of ET technology. Thematically, Lagowski posits a different metaphor for "Pod" away from the control of information and closer to an escape mentality that was embraced by the members of the Heaven's Gate cult. Within this context, Lagowski has crafted an evocative collage of crackling VLF recordings, air-traffic control transmissions of UFO sightings, and other cosmic transmissions.
This one is a mind bender. The strangely named Seance Orchestra's Cosmic Mind Zoo offer up two cassettes of ultra abstract, minimal soundscapery, one tape is all buzzing electronic hum, flittering fields of tinkling glass percussion, massive speaker shaking low end swells, grinding throbbing stuttering bass buzz that is so thick and dense it almost swallows the rest of the sounds completely up, angular crumbling guitar distortion, bits of voice and vocals, while the other tape is heavier and much more brutal, a definite Dead C style skree, but muted and spread out into a strange hissy staticky pulse, that throbs and emits a strange subtle melodiousness, murky and prickly and weirdly warm and washed out.
Two tapes, a color insert and some stickers all housed in one of those massive plastic multiple tape cases, that usually house language tapes or self help tapes, the artwork some complex bit of electronic diagramming.
As with all things like this, ultra limited, so if you want one don't be hemming and hawing...
Saaad is a French duo with a small catalogue of mostly digital-only releases, and Deep/Float is quite a feather in their cap, as not only their first piece of vinyl but also an album released by the tastemaking imprint Hands In The Dark, who have previously put out records by the likes of Death & Vanilla, Robedoor, Cankun, and Ensemble Economique. Saaad are probably selling themselves short with their lackluster name which might come across as a mere mnemonic shorthand for any given ambient project over the past 30 years. Within the album, cinematic vapor trails course through these blurred ambient orchestrations, that could easily draw comparisons to the dreamy dreamtime sounds of A Winged Victory For The Sullen or the psychonaut introspection of Tangerine Dream or even the more industrially minded rumblings of Troum. These thick, immersive arrangements for synths and reverb hinge on simple melodies that flicker through head-swimmingly dense accretions of echo upon delay upon reverb upon more echo, delay, and reverb. The elliptical melodies require a considerable amount of space to articulate themselves with all of the ghostly haziness, making one melodic phrase appear like carlights in a nighttime fog, becoming blindingly obvious only to dissolve into an inky blackness. Not surprisingly, Saaad's pacing is suitably slow and creeping, but the darkness of their tones is hardly ominous. Theirs is a sound that envelops and soothes. This feeling is emblematic of the majestic stasis of "New Helicon" which has all of the forest-borne transmission of the pure ambient tracks on those stately Gas albums. "Valley Of Quartz" sparkles with twinkling trills that lace the gaseous arcs of what could be the ion-engine hums from alien rocket ships accelerating through a deep space nebula. The album's finale "After Love" is a bleak funereal ambient dirge with Caretakerish melody slowly descending into the event horizon of a black hole. Sounds to tug at your heart strings; and limited to 300 copies!
Sabers? What's this? The picture on back is one of those band equipment in the studio photos that resemble a sculptural art gallery installation, all wires and mic stands and pedals and mixers and drums and amps. Interestin'... well, as you may know, the Neurot label has done us darn right of late, with several recent releases being AQ-list highlights (House Of Low Culture, Grails). Here's another one that also impressed the heck out of us, the debut from NYC's Sabers. They're a two-man band, one guy on guitar and effects and the other on percussion and effects. Not a little effects, a lot of effects. And a lot of amps -- it's a baritone guitar they use that goes through a multitude of bass and guitar amps. These two guys and their gear make glorious, miasmic music -- sparse, rhythmic and wholly instrumental abstractions that ought to appeal to both Starfuckers and Skullflower fans to use two relatively obscure references (sorry). Sabers' heavily droning yet quietly restrained soundscapes are also a bit like Neurosis stripped of most instruments, vocals, song structure, and aggression (but not menace). Artful, original, and extremely moody. Massive and mysterious. We like.
Sabiston is an ex-member of Axolotl, and records under the name Ball Lightning, we had a totally kick ass cd-r from BL a while back. A mindblowingly inventive percussionist, Sabiston is also a pretty amazing video artist as well.
This ultra limited 3" dvd-r features three short films, each one in glorious super lo-res black and white, filmed using a Pixelvision camera, one of those failed toys that became a prized possession for those who could find 'em. The Pixelvision uses regular old cassette audio tapes to capture super lo-fi video, high contrast black and white, very creepy and beautiful and alien looking. It's like watching an ultrasound, weird shapes stutter and jump, lines move, static drifts and wiggles, sort of like video feedback, but even more simple and abstract. So gorgeous and haunting. Each film features original music from Sabiston, a swirling fuzzscape of sound, stuttery glitchy skitter flitting over deep rumbling bass thrum, while buried within are soft snippets of looped melody, everything occasionally blissing out into dubbed out pulses and cavernous low end throbs.
Packaged in a mini 3" plastic DVD case, with black and white artwork.
LIMITED TO 90 COPIES!!!! Already out of print, these are the last copies ever... ----* ----* In Stock, Not Yet Reviewed : ----* If you want to order one of these, just search on the item, then click on the buy button and it will be added to your cart! 7000 DYING RATS "Season In Hell" (He Who Corrupts) cd 13.98 A.M. "Orla" (Ikuisuus) cd 15.98 ADULT "Why Bother?" (Thrill Jockey) cd/lp 15.98/13.98 AFFLICTED MAN "The Complete Recordings" (Senseless Whale) 2cd 22.00 ALVARS ORKESTER "Organic Woodtrip 1991-1992" (Kning Disk) cd 17.98 AMORT / THE COMFORT WIVES "Black Blood / Locusta" (Orobas) cassette 4.00 ARBOREA "Wayfaring Summer" (Summer Street) cd 11.98 ASH POOL "Genital Tomb" (Tour De Garde) cassette 5.98 ASTRAL SOCIAL CLUB "#1-7" (self released) MP3 cd-r 10.98 ASTRAL SOCIAL CLUB "#11" (self released) cd-r 10.98 ASTRAL SOCIAL CLUB "#12" (self released) cd-r 10.98 AUGHRA & MOSH PATROL "Is There Anyone Else Outside?" (Magic Bullet) cd 12.98 AZRAEL "Act III: Self & Act IV: Goat" (Moribund) 2cd 14.98 BABY GRANDMOTHERS "s/t" (Subliminal Sounds) cd 16.98 BARK HAZE "s/t" (Important) lp 14.98 BARK HAZE, THE "Total Joke Era" (Important Records) cd 14.98 BARR, MICK / OCTIS "Iohargh Wended" (Tzadik) cd 16.98 BE PERSECUTED "I.I." (No Colours) cd 15.98 BEE GEES "Horizontal" (Reprise) cd 23.00 BEE GEES "Idea" (Reprise) 2cd 23.00 BLACK TO COMM "Wir Konnen Leider Nicht Etwas Mehr Zu Tun..." (Dekorder) 2lp 21.00 CASHMORE, MICHAEL "The Snow Abides" (Durtro Jnana) cd 12.98 CAVE, NICK & THE BAD SEEDS "The Abattoir Blues Tour" (Mute) 2cd+2dvd 33.00 CHECKER, CHUBBY "Goes Psychedelic" (Underground Masters) cd 21.00 CJA "Pink Metal" (PseudoArcana) 2cd-r 16.98 COLLEY, JOE & JASON LESCALLEET "Annihilate This Week" (Brombron) cd 15.98 DAVENPORT FAMILY "At The Foot Of Zodiac Mountain" (Meudiademorte) cassette 5.98 DENVER GENTLEMEN "Introducing" (Smooch) cd 10.98 DIAGNOSE: LEBENSGEFAHR "Transformalin" (Autopsy Kitchen) cd 14.98 EL-P "I'll Sleep When You're Dead" (Definitive Jux) cd/lp 16.98/16.98 ENSEPULCHERED "The Night Our Rituals Blackened The Stars" (Autopsy Kitchen) cd 13.98 FORTID "Voluspa Part II: The Arrival Of Fenris" (No Colours) cd 15.98 FRAZER, PAULA AND TARNATION "Now It's Time" (Birdman) cd 14.98 GHOSTING "Fox Glove" (Digitalis Industries) cd-r 7.98 GRIMFAUG "Defloration Of Life's Essence" (Eerie Art) cd 15.98 GURDJIEFF, G.I. & THOMAS DE HARTMAN "Oriental Suite" (Basta) 4cd+book 113.00 J DILLA "Ruff Draft" (Stones Throw) 2cd 17.98 JAZZFINGER "Ugly For A Living" (Gold Soundz) cd-r 9.98 JAZZFINGER / NUMBER NONE "Penny Dreadful / Lichfields" (Gold Soundz) cd-r 9.98 JENSEN SPORTAG "s/t" (Midisport) cd 12.98 JONES, GLENN "Against Which The Sea Continually Beats" (Strange Attractors Audio) cd 14.98 KUUPUU "Unilintu" (Dekorder) lp 16.98 LEO, TED AND THE PHARMACISTS "Living With The Living" (Touch And Go) cd+ep 14.98 LESBIAN "Power Hor" (Holy Mountain) cd 14.98 MINSK "The Ritual Fires Of Abandonment" (Relapse) cd 12.98 MOEBIUS "Tonspuren" (Captain Trip) cd 26.00 MOEBIUS / PLANK "Material" (Captain Trip) cd 26.00 MOEBIUS / PLANK "Rastakraut Pasta" (Captain Trip) cd 26.00 MOEBIUS / PLANK / NEUMEIER "Zero Set" (Captain Trip) cd 26.00 N.I.L. "s/t" (Battle Kommand) cd 14.98 NEGURA BUNGET "Inarborat Kosmos" (Code 666) cd 13.98 OTOMO, YOSHIHIDE "Multiple Otomo" (Asphodel) dvd+cd 16.98 QUETZOLCOATL "Vast Eternity Bridges" (Abandon Ship) cassette 5.00 RAMESES III "Honey Rose" (Important) cd 14.98 RWAKE "Voices Of Omens" (Relapse) cd 12.98 SHANKAR, ANANDA "A Musical Discovery Of India" (Cloud Forest Recordings) cd 17.98 SILMARIL "The Voyage Of Icarus" (Locust) cd 14.98 SWALLOW THE SUN "Hope" (Candlelight) cd 13.98 TIMES NEW VIKING "Present The Paisley Reich" (Siltbreeze) cd/lp 13.98/13.98 TOLL "Christ Knows" (Cold Spring) cd 15.98 TRANS AM "Sex Change" (Thrill Jockey) cd/lp 14.98/12.98 TROLLMANN AV ILDTOPPBERG "Tolling Beyond The Tombs Of Ancient Grimnity" (Monolith) cd-r 10.98 V/A "Babcotte, Sudbury And Eaton: The English School Of Funerary Origin" (The Guild Of Funerary Violinists) cd-r 10.98 V/A "Bombay Connection Vol. 2, Bouncin' Grooves From Bollywood Films 1959-1972" (Bombay Connection) cd/2lp 16.98/32.00 V/A "Cherrystones Word" (Tlon Uqbar) cd 10.98 V/A "D-I-Y: Do It Yourself" (Soul Jazz) cd/lp 21.00/24.00 VXPXCX "Reticent Manifest" (Abandon Ship) cassette 5.00 WARPIG "s/t" (Relapse) cd 14.98 WATERMANN, JOHN "Calcutta Gas Chamber" (Cold Spring) cd/pic lp 15.98/35.00 WIZARD PRISON "II" (Gravelvoice) cd 8.98 WOODEN SPOON "The Folk Blues Guitar Of...." (Bo'Weavil) cd 17.98 WUTHERING HEIGHTS "The Shadow Cabinet" (Sensory) 2cd 15.98 YOUNG, NEIL "Massey Hall 1971" (Reprise) cd + dvd 24.00 _______________________________________________________________________ ABOUT MAILORDER
Here's another reincarnation of Maurizio Bianchi's Sacher Pelz project. Back in the late 70s, the Italian industrialist self-published a handful of cassettes for super primitive musique concrete recordings culled from turntable / needle abuse upon LPs by Kraftwerk, Neu!, and Conrad Schnitzler. In 1979, he picked up some new gear and changed his nom de plume to M.B. through which he fabricated some of the best power electronic / post-industrial noisescapes of that era. Recently, the man has been excessively prolific, getting somewhere near the Aidan Baker and Merzbow quantities for output; and In Hoc Urbia Miazi is the second album that he's released using this name again. While many of the recent Maurizio Bianchi albums have been all over the map with some decent ambient constructs, some brilliantly droning grim 'n' gloom, and some curious forays into cybernetic rhythms, it appears that Bianchi has reserved the Sacher Pelz project for noisy projects based around tape hiss and rough hewn musique concrete. In Hoc Urbia Miazi is just that: a boiling mess of looping tape hiss, varispeed accelerations, and razor cut edits between between the white noise chorus of tape hiss piled densely on top of itself. The label made references to the classic Come Organisation sound made famous by Whitehouse; but Bianchi's Sacher Pelz shares more in common with the blank tape experiments by Reynols heard on their self-evidently titled album Blank Tapes or by the obscure Australian turntablist project Gum.
"Sacher Pelz offered up burnt offerings, and finally they began to say to the other: 'The true MB is the giver of acts of vengeance to us," quoting Maurizio Bianchi from the obtusely apocalyptic liner notes to his 4 CD box of his earliest material as
Stephan Kraus' well researched website on the history of Bianchi (which can be located at Brainwashed) indicated that much of the original source material from these cassettes was taken from Bianchi's abused Kraftwerk vinyl, then vastly recontextualized into monotonous loops, completely devoid of anything sounding like Kraftwerk. I guess it could be the music of Kraftwerk, but if "Autobahn" had been exhumed from a lengthy burial in a murky swamp.
"Cainus" is Bianchi's very first outing, finding him enthralled by the looping technology of a varispeed tape machine. An entirely decentralized affair, this recording takes those post-mortem tones from his beaten Kraftwerk albums and warbles arrhythmically through several repetitions then shifts into a different loop. "Venus" is similar in the arrhythmia of looping textures, but finds Bianchi experimenting with the varispeed and with an additional synthesizer bleeding through the turgid noise. Even within these recordings which are decidedly primitive, Bianchi makes it very clear that the monotony and dullness of his records are an intentional pursuit for his music, as exorcisms of the existential frustrations of life. "Cease To Exist" progresses more into the sinister dense collage work that precedes his masterpieces as MB, "Endometrio" and "Carcinosi." The final Sacher Pelz recording "Velours" is the most advanced of the four with the loops showing a much broader spectrum from clarity to abstraction, with some of his samples coming directly from Neu! "2" (an interesting choice as that album was a remix of Neu!'s earliest recordings!), but most distorted into a bass-heavy muddle of Merzbow proportions.
It must be stated that while this Sacher-Pelz boxset is an fascinating document of Bianchi's earliest work, this box isn't nearly as good as the truly depressing but totally overwhelming MB recordings.
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As for the reasons for the reprise of the Sacher-Pelz moniker, maybe we'll never know; regardless, Maurizio Bianchi has returned to the name that started his illustrious career of sinister, industrial abstraction some thirty years ago. In the late '70s, Bianchi recorded a handful of cassettes as Sacher-Pelz using little more than a turntable, a varispeed 4-track, some well worn Kraftwerk, Neu!, and Conrad Schnitzler LPs as source material, and lots of rough-cut tape splicing in a primitive attempt at a ghastly variation on musique concrete with a few moments of toxic brilliance. Four of those early cassettes had been reissued in a Sacher-Pelz box through E'est / Alga Marghen (who were also responsible for the reissues of the 10 classic M.B. recordings from the early '80s). That box set evaporated from the market very quickly, along with most of those classic M.B. records. For the 2006 incarnation of Sacher-Pelz, Bianchi cites as his source material "concretonic irradition for concrete noises, efflorescent loops, and foetologic guitar." Ah, yes, Bianchi has always had a way with the English language! The sounds that he musters from those sources has much more in common with those that he generated as M.B. particularly found on his 1983 masterpiece The Plain Truth. Clerzphase swarms with a post-mortem atmosphere as cold cold cold electronic vibrations offer little room beyond intense claustrophobia. Hints of horror film minor key melodies and megaphone-distorted vocals may be lurking in the mix, yet Bianchi's vibrating patterns are so relentless as to obfuscate every undergirding sound to the Sacher-Pelz death-ambient mantras.
Limited to 250 copies.
From our friends at the mighty fine Utech label comes this heady blast of spaced out Japanese psychedelic ritualistic minimalism, part of the same batch of releases which also included the dark droning minimalism of Owwl and the blackened spacedrift of Sky Burial. Sachiko is in fact a member of amazing Japanese psych rock combo Overhang Party, as well as Kousokuya, but here veers quite far from the psych rock path, and instead forges a droned out drift worthy of late great Japanese Fluxus psychdronelords Taj Majal Travellers, a 37 minute sprawl of primitive percussion, layered thrum, garbled vocalizations, woozy buzz and swirling shimmer, whistles and bells, electronics and fluttering flutes, bowed strings and spidery melodies, all blurred and woven into an epic stretch of raga like swirl. The track surprisingly dynamic, shifting from dense and chaotic, to hushed and hypnotic, but all woven together by warm whirring drones and strange almost Yoko Ono like mewling vox, the sound organic and alive, pulsing, and pulsating, a throbbing rhythmic core driving the track subtly from within, the surface a frenzy of microtonal shifts and constantly transforming overtones, headphones definitely required, allowing the listener to sink deep into Sachiko's lush mysterious soundworld. So gorgeous. And fantastically and psychedelically mesmerizing. Essential for Japanese psych freeks, but folks into more modern raga-psych a la Sunroof! or Our Love Will Destroy The World and the rest, might find this to their liking as well�
Houses in a super striking minimal oversized sleeve. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
"Sacred Flesh" is an erotic lesbian nun film made by Nigel Wingrove who commissioned Band Of Pain's Steve Pittis to score the soundtrack. Using a similar dialogue-recycling technique that John Duncan used for his "John See Soundtracks," Pittis incorporates echoed voices (some of religious incantations, some of sexual ecstacy) directly into the soundtrack dominated by deep washes of dark ambience. Or as the guy who writes the Relapse catalog blurb says "I've got to see this movie!!" You'll understand after you see the booklet photos. In any event, another fine Band of Pain release.
Heads up! Here comes another wave of limited edition 7"s from 333 Records! Each release in this series is pressed in an ultra small quantity of 333! The latest additions are this one by Sagan and one by Girl Talk. Plus: The first 100 of this Sagan single comes with a little extra something -- a bonus 3"cdr! Don't fret too much if you do miss the first 100 though 'cause we've been assured that the track will be available online for download too. The ever mischievous and crafty trio of Jay Lesser, Blevin Blectum, Wobbly pour out the prickly tickles, thick bass thuddery, and druggy effected vocals for these two short heavily processed and distorted tracks. Always entertaining! We've only got a handful of these. Snoooze'n'loooze, kiddie!
We've been getting more and more tired of electronic music recently. How could you not? It seems that every week there's a hundred more glitchy wannabe Autechres or Aphex Twins. But thankfully, there are always groups of folks, quietly doing their own thing, thinking weird thoughts and making weird sounds, turning unlikely concepts into reality, and offering us amazing alternatives to the usual crap we are forced to sift through day after day. Thus we have Sagan. With a pedigree that would have us expecting no less. Jay Lesser, Bevin Blectum, Wobbly, fim maker Ryan Junell, and the label run by Drew And Martin of Matmos. You'd almost find yourself shouting 'supergroup' if yo didn't know that such behavior would get you a punch in the nose.
A massive concept album based on Carl Sagan and just good 'ol science in general, Unseen Forces is a heaping sensory overload of sonic irregularites and visual fuckery. The audio disc is a lot more listenable that you might expect from audio terrorists like Lesser and Blectum. It's a far spacier affair, channelling classic Tangerine Dream, Pink Floyd swoosh, Hawkwind spaciness, as well as modern glitch into a slowly swirling galaxy of shimmery synths, and stuttering starbursts, throbbing techno broadcast from a distant galaxy, and garbled through the light years into a smeary ambient blur, demarcated by chirps and clicks, thumps and throbs. A space opera for the IDM set.
We were a bit wary of the accompanying film, fearing at best, some sort of cool music videos, and at worst, home movies of band members mugging and acting silly. Well, somehow it's actually both, but the sum of those parts is infinitely more watchable than you might think and so completely compliments Sagan's techno space glitch swirl. So much so that after watching the film, every time we listen to the record now, all we can picture is the scenes from the film! Various historical scientific discoveries and encounters are fictionalized and re-enacted by the band members as well as the guys from Matmos and AQ pal Dave Cerf. Gorgeously filmed and masterfully edited, the grainy Viewmaster menus and segues perfectly balance the silent movie feel of the vignettes, with the action skipping and hiccupping to the music. Funny and fascinating, silly but emminently watchable. Also the opening sequence and the closing credits are AMAZING looking. This record and film have been in the works for a LONG time, but we are happy to report that the wait was worth it!
Also, the hybrid DVD contains 9 shows with over 6 hours of music!
This was another one of those records that just showed up one day, and knocked us on our asses. And while all the descriptors pointed to something that would be right up our alley, spacey and psychedelic, krautrocky and kosmische, heavy and hazy, which all do definitely apply, the music manages to embody all those adjectives, while tangling them up into something all its own.
This one man band opens up the proceedings with some droned out psychedelic synths, sounding like Amps For Christ or Daniel Higgs, the sounds undulating and spiraling into little tangled melodic squalls, there are bells, and a deep crooned almost chantlike vocal, very hypnotic and almost new agey, those droning synths (or are they effected guitars?), get more and more wild as the song proceeds, a wild woolly freakout over that deep sonorous drone. Great stuff, and we would have been perfectly happy had the whole record sounded like that, but instead, the second song starts off all low slung slither and wah guitar, it's got 'boogie' in the title, and it shows, sort of. Loose and ramshackle, the guitars again blossom into soaring streaks of high end skree, the drums pound and stumble, the vocals wreathed in reverb, the sound insanely dubbed out, everything swallowed up in echo and send swirling into the ether before landing again and reengaging with the in-progress kraut-dub space rock freakout. This is the sort of shit Burnt Hills would conjure up if they wrote songs instead of endless jams, infusing sort-of-proper song structures with all the elements of an unhinged drug addled jam, and the results are pretty wild.
The rest of the record though is all over the place, feet firmly planted in psychedelia, and Appalachia, but exploring pretty much every disparate strain, from clattery, foresty free folk, sounding almost like No Neck Blues Band or Avarus, to back porch bluegrass Fahey-y style American primitivism, from strummy, synthy, noise drenched darkdrone balladry (maybe our favorite track, sounding like a muted Merzbow / Portishead slowburn mashup woven into some Appalachian psychedelic creep), to blown out, in-the-red, Japanese psych style White Heaven / Les Rallizes / Fushitsusha grinding guitar freakout, finally finishing off with another bout of melancholic minor key Appalachia.
Killer stuff, most definitely recommended for fans of modern psych, neo-Appalachia, psychedelic dronemusic and the weirder side of space/psych/drone rock.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES! Includes multiple inserts.
The latest mysterious musical missive from now local label Moon Glyph comes in the form of this gorgeous bit of collaged ambience from M. Sage, who sound hovers in the shadows between the Caretaker, Philip Jeck and Tim Hecker, a woozy loopscape of random radio snippets, of treated instruments and muted moody melodies, processed guitars drift wraith like over haunting field recordings, wreathed in hazy swirls of static, the various sounds all blurred into soft focus impressionistic drifts, that just seem to fade in and out, like the flickering of an old filmstrip, or the world viewed through the dusty old window of a beat up car, driving through empty towns and long abandoned neighborhoods. Sound become distorted, gristly and crunchy, shards of caustic buzz surface here and there, but are quickly smeared into another layer of sweetly swirling sound. And when proper instruments do surface, they give the sound a haunted otherworldly twang, or a glistening prismatic cosmic shimmer. The sound constantly shifting from sun dappled dreamlike glimmer, to murky, faded drifts, softly churning dronescapes, all slowed down sounds and softly keening melodies, warm whirs and hushed crackle, to darkly cinematic mesmer, the crackle almost becoming a physical presence, the dreamy lilting thrum beneath almost wholly obscure by this glorious patina of crunch and crackle, turning sound into something impossible tactile, a blissed out sprawl of heavenly soft noise. So utterly, and hauntingly gorgeous.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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Beyond the scope of AMM, percussionist Eddie Prevost and Keith Rowe have been exploring the synthesis of improvisation and digitized electronics through a handful of divergent ensembles. Where Rowe's M.I.M.E.O. was a massive 13 piece ensemble with a number of forceful egos struggling with each other for position in the stereo field, Prevost's Sakada -- a far less cumbersome trio working with Australian transplant Rosy Parlane and the London-based Basque who simply goes by Mattin -- succeeds in marrying specific textures found within an unconventional means of playing a drum kit and an unconventional means of digital sound. With Parlane and Mattin working the electronic workstations to generate radio static and controlled feedback manipulations (no clean samples here! everything's covered in a layer of grit), Prevost never strikes the heads of his drums once. Rather he scrapes metal objects around the rims, bows the cymbals, and rubs handheld motors on the skins themselves. Many of the sounds could have come from an Organum record; however, Sakada is far more of disjointed affair snarling and stumbling their way through 3 extended improvisations recorded in London and Barcelona in 2002.
Yes, more delicate spectral music from Finland! Sala-Arhimo are a branch off of the Islaja tree... and if you're at all familiar with us here at AQ you know we're mighty fond of 'em. This self titled album is very hazy, Spartan and folk-tinged much like Islaja, but perhaps a bit darker, more somber and mournful. Lovely.
A druggy troll through a cough syrup drenched new wave underworld. Like waking up in some filthy sonic back alley, your head spinning, and you ears filled with fuzz. The memories of last night's little fragments, coming back to you in bits and pieces, some murky analog synths, some stumbling drum programming, lots of creepy low slung bass...but it's the druggy female voices that swirl around your head like some hangover halo, sultry and sexy but also distinctly alien, drenched in FX, cooing softly in your ear, a late night, narcoleptic narcotic lullaby. An Adult. 45 played at 16 rpm, Nico fronting some slow motion electroclash outift, a mysterious damaged doom version of Glass Candy, a seriously fucked up new wave Portishead? Sally Strobelight is all of those things. A delightfully damaged, druggy, slow motion new wave electro dirge missive from some doomed and drug ravaged otherworld. Awesome.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!! Clear vinyl housed in a gorgeous in tranluscent, full-color vellum sleeve!
After the breakup of the much-loved floor-core noise duo, Yellow Swans, Pete Swanson has carved quite a solo career for himself, but we haven't heard as much from fellow YS member Gabriel Saloman. As it turns out, Saloman has been rather busy himself over the past few years in Vancouver working on various solo projects of his own under the monikers of GMS and Sade Sade and with collaborative projects Diadem and Chambers. Most of his projects have taken on a conceptual form of social resistance like his Music for Prisons project, which employed field recordings of protests for imprisoned Tamil refugees with original music to be broadcast at extreme volume outside of prison walls as a form of political protest against authoritarian-imposed incarceration.
But Adhere, his vinyl debut for the Miasmah label, is the first time we're getting a full sense of the range of Saloman's sonic vision, and it is uniquely compelling and powerful. Composed in collaboration with a contemporary dance group, Adhere reads as a modern classical composition in seven parts with intense builds and pregnant silences, centered around reverberated piano, bowed strings, ambient guitar, percussive woodblocks and martial drumming into a captivating and beautiful soundscape. Sometimes the intensity is restrained by minimal piano stabs in a big empty room, in the third part, we hear some gorgeous Robin Guthrie-ish guitar washes, still later some dramatic yet solemn percussion. The entire composition toggling back and forth between quietly pensive dynamics and voluminous crescendos that give a sonic drama to an obviously visual accompaniment. Perfect for the Miasmah label which has always had a strong focus on marrying works of experimental classical forms with dark penetrating ambience.
K Salvatore is an unspecified permutation of the modern-day, free-noise hippy collective The No Neck Blues Band. The Counterfeiter is the fourth album from this side project and is a sprawling loose improvisation for quiet horn flutter, wild flute trills,
The newest release from this mysterious two man No Necked side project. A darkly damaged and demented abstract drone folk freakout. Soundiing not surprisingly like NNCK through the looking glass. A tripped out warped sonic funhouse of squiggly synth noodling, warbly wah guitar, haunting creaks, sporadic rhythmic clatter, dreamy blissy acoustic guitar strum, cicada like clicking minimalism, all wrapped up in thick layers of rumbling fuzzy ambience. Occasionally melodic fragments drift by, or bleeping blooping electronics surface, but for the most part. Asmadai is a mystical musical mystery in the form of warm muted underwater warble. So great. Another No Necked offshoot that can seem to do no wrong.
Two thick slabs of 45 rpm wax, housed in a gorgeously designed thick black and white sleeve.
And as with most things like this, VERY LIMITED!
The Australian sound artist Philip Samartzis has been working out the details of his Soft and Loud concept through various sketches which have been released on the Grain and Variable Resistance compilations, as well as in his contribution to the Mort Aux Vaches Staalplaat series. The source material and some of the compositional strategies tie all of his Soft And Loud pieces together, but it quickly becomes clear with this disc that Samartzis at last has fully realized his ideas of the surgical articulations of tactile aural phenomena within temporally linear progressions. In other words, he melds the ideas of INGRM's musique concrete (especially Luc Ferrari) to the pristine electro-glitch aesthetics of Raster-Noton and 12K (especially Carsten Nicolai and Richard Chartier). However, Samartzis is not purely a formalist, for there is a sense of metaphor and introspection that is evident in his work. All of the material found throughout the Soft and Loud pieces is from field recordings that Samartzis made on several trips to Japan. These compositions speak with a hyper-reality of his own reflections upon Japan's incredibly complex culture. In particular, Samartzis concentrates on the unique dialogue between the artificial and the natural. Set against a stark backdrop of empty silences, Samartzis' composition is pinpricked with tactile events: cracklings, sinewave mantras, pneumatic crunches, nauseatingly happy pachinko themes, a maudlin Japanese flute much like Akio Suzuki, etc.
Even though some of the same materials have been presented before, it's unusual to have the opportunity to witness the progression of piece of music such as this. So many times, a composition stands as a monument to the genius of the musician; not so here, for Samartzis has worked out all of the blemishes and false starts (perhaps even encouraging them!) under the critical ears of a listening public. So what I'm trying to say is that even if you already have the earlier parts to the Soft And Loud series, it's well worth picking up this highly recommended album!
The Australian sound artist Philip Samartzis is essentially presenting two bodies of work on Unheard Spaces, both of which are connected through the relationship between sound and emptiness. The first suite for Unheard Spaces is called "Absence And Presence" and opens with an abusive scrape across a cello announcing something of new direction for Samartzis. The pristinely crafted electro-acoustics which culminated in the dynamic Loud & Soft album have been replaced on the first half of Unheard Spaces with a series of spacious, yet expressionist clattering improvisations between Samartzis (electronics and field recordings), David Brown (guitar), Sean Baxter (drums), Anthea Caddy (cello), Thembi Soddell (electronics and field recordings), and Michael Vorfeld (percussion). However, Samartzis introduced one hell of a detour to the typical improvisational context: as he asked the participants to re-record what they had performed during the improvised session by memory and without the benefit of hearing what any body else was doing. The strategy is much more of a conceptual conceit that certainly adds to the randomness of the clusters of spluttering guitar, squealing sinewave oscillations, and tumbles of percussive improvisation.
The second half of Unheard Spaces (also called "Unheard Spaces") is something of an homage to the work of the late, great composer Luc Ferrari, whose cinematic musique concrete compositions brought an unnerving psychosexuality to his decentered collages. Perhaps less inclined for the lurid aspects of Ferrari's work (at least here, there's plenty of grotesqueries to be heard on his early Gum project of turntablist damage), Samartzis concentrates on the very subtle sounds within the urban landscape, Venice's landscape to be exact. The echoes from the various canals and antiquated passageways comprise the bulk of Samartzis' field recordings, with a healthy dose of watery sounds just to make sure you didn't forget this was Venice. What's clearly missing is the hustle and bustle of the city itself, as Samartzis has surgically removed almost all of the direct human presence. While the sound of cars and boats provides activity in the composition, the human voice is never the direct focal point; rather it's the elegant refractions of sound emerging from a labyrinth of a city. An impressive duality of improvisation and manipulated field recordings that would have easily been the jewel in INA-GRM's crown had this been recorded thirty years ago in Paris.
For those who have paid attention to the Microsound and Phonography online lists, much has been made about the certainty some pundits place upon the categorization and divisions between the computer based Microsound genre and the field recordist based Phonography. An argument of similar rhetoric raged in the '60s between the German school of electronic music and the French school of Musique Concrete, but there were a couple of Swedish composers (Rune Lindblad in particular) who saw the advantage of both compositional models working harmoniously. Melbourne based composer Philip Samartzis holds a comparable postion as a relative outsider to these primarily European / American discourses; and thus has been able to synthesize elements from both field recording manipulation and the generative models of computerized sound construction. "Windmills Border By Nothingness" is his second solo CD, after recording a couple of hard to find noise-junk albums as Gum (which may get reissued sometime in the future through 23five). Samartzis' title of this 39 minute composition is indicative of the numerous punctuations of silence that bracket all of the events housed within. Unlike the practitioners of low-volume compositions (Gunter, Roden, Chartier, etc), Samartzis punctures sound with silence rather than playing the notions of audibility. Rushing waters, scraping improv guitar work (possibly from fellow Aussie David Brown), repeated metallic clangs, the hushed clickery of run-out grooves, indeterminant creakings, tense rattles from electronic vibrations, and strident granular synthesis are splattered across the stereo field with silences as breathing room. A very nice recording.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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Outside of their sporadic collaborations, Rasmus B. Lunding and Philip Samartzis exist in vastly different quarters of the avant-garde, as the Danish Lunding is best known for tinkering with programmable Lego constructions as the basis for composition and installation, where the Australian Samartzis wields his digital operating theatre with the precision of a skilled surgeon. The alliance which forged Touch Parking could be described as the Second Annual Transoceanic Summit for Giddy Robotic Engineers and Texturally Inclined Post-Turntablists. Both artists bring all of their tricks of the trade to the table (e.g. purposefully artificial DSP effects, microsonic explosiveness, theatrical drop outs, variable spatialization, divergent polyphony, etc.), and actually balance out each other's strengths, as Lunding's sense of humour works well with Samartzis' expertise in abstraction. Touch Parking resolves itself as a Mobius strip of surfaces, with the complex collages of electro-acoustic events colliding into each other and emerging in an inscrutable rebus of semiotic dead-ends and idiosyncrasies. Goodiepal's artwork on this picture disc replete with S&M cheesecake illustrations and pinstriped Rune stones further complicates the ecstatic absurdities for the album.
Philip Samartzis is an Australian electro-acoustic composer, who had gone on a tour across Japan a few years ago and through his travels developed some interesting relationships with a number of likeminded composers in Japan. After working with onkyo
The band with history's most intriguing combination of band name and genre tag returns! Yes, it's Seattle's self proclaimed "deep space power violence" two-piece Same Sex Dictator, rearing its hideous two heads once more to inflict maximum eye-bulging agony and crushing, rib-splitting suffocation upon feeble fleshbags the world over! Open The Coffin is an album length cassette bursting with ideas - heaving and bubbling over with punishing d-beat hardcore aggression, lurching scorch-earth doom, rank agonized vocal howls, and lush alien synthesizers. The ritual pummel of tribal toms roll into a swaying drug-haze of a jam. Throbbing John Carpenter ambience gives way to grinding uptempo blackened punk. The martial shuffle of a militaristic snare crumbles under the weight of a limping minimal nausea-groove which builds into a riotous double bass flurry. And all the while, whether at their most furious or most ominously minimal, there is a constant undercurrent of murky dread, like the shadow of a leviathan beneath the waters, not to mention a wholly unhealthy dose of violent misanthropy. And with song titles like "Obviously Dead", "God Is Not Here" and "Run Into Knives" would you expect/want any less?? Of course not. Highly recommended for musical masochists everywhere.
Part one in the Table Of The Elements' label series of super limited one sided 12"s, comes from the relatively unknown Georgia ensemble San Agustin, a three piece free-rock-minimalist-noise-improv outfit that takes the propulsive rhythms of post rock, deconstructs them and wraps them in dense clouds of shifting drone, with occasional NNCK tribalism and Dead C-ish clatter. Really beautiful. They also have a 3 cd set on TOTE if this 12" strikes your fancy. Gorgeous woodcut image silkscreened in glow-in-the-dark ink on clear vinyl in a clear sleeve. So nice. And SO LIMITED!
Here's a three-way split, presented as 'a string based compilation.' Yup, the guitar is the centerpiece to these experimental smears and dronescapes, starring Aidan Baker, Licht-Ung label boss Milan Sandbleistift, and Relapxych.0 (an upcoming Swedish laptop trickster, or so we assume). Sandbleistift's gauzy drones hover above a thick amplifier hum, coupled with metal-on-metal scrapes, electrical interference directed into the pick-ups, and spidery textures that wiggle into the mix as he plucks away at the bridge of his guitar. Imagine Keith Rowe recording for Celebrate Psi Phenomenon. This is a pretty good track; but to be honest, it's Aidan Baker who steals the show on this album. Even with his esteemed catalogue of ethereal ambience and doomdronedirge excursions, "One Step Ahead, One Step Behind" is pretty exceptional. A desolate guitar melody repeats throughout the entire track, alluding to the doom of Nadja had he kicked on the distortion pedals. But without, there's a sadness which permeates the track, accompanied by ghostly flickers of complimentary drones, flanging bursts of static, and a slow-burning roar of distant distortion that eventually consumes the entire piece. So good! Relapxych.0 holds his own in creating a series of guitar-meets-the-laptop abstractions that looks to Fennesz and Tim Hecker for inspiration, and does a pretty good job in the way of an homage. Limited to a mere 300 copies; and it remains to be seen, if any more will be made available to us!
Solo record from the guitarist of death metal geniuses Nile. Not what you might be expecting. Think all the 'Asian/Eastern' interludes from Nile records, all new agey with some very questionable vocals/lyrics. Ugh. A bit cheesy. Not sure what Sanders (and Release/Relapse) was thinking. Definitely worth checking out for it's WTF value, but even diehard Nile obsessives will be hard pressed to find a reason for having this in their collection.
A wonderful piece of history precedes the reissue of this recording by the British pioneer of DIY electronics and cassette culture, Philip Sanderson. Having manufactured a number of cassette-only releases from 1978 - 1981 through his label Snatch Tapes, Sanderson devised the rather cynical ploy of recording under the moniker Claire Thomas and Susan Vezey to see if labels like Rough Trade, Cherry Red, or Fast Product might take the bait of women artists producing abstract electronic music. It's the same dodgy yet brilliant ploy recently used by San Francisco's Ziegenbock Kopf to market themselves as gay leatherboys. Unlike ZK, Sanderson got so far as to get a Claire Thomas and Susan Vezey track on the intriguing Cherry Red compilation entitled "Perspectives and Distortions" alongside The Virgin Prunes, Eyeless In Gaza, The Lemon Kittens, and Robert Fripp. The charade was up when Cherry Red made an offer to Claire and Susan to release an album and wanted to meet the two. Upon learning of the ruse, Cherry Red decide to pull out of the deal instead of continuing the masquerade. It's a shame that it had to come to that as Sanderson had produced a really amazing record of low-tech Cluster-inspired electronic bubblings, although Cherry Red's reaction is an understandable one. Regardless, Sanderson shrugged it off, issued the recordings as "Reprint" through Snatch in 1980, and thankfully 23 years later re-released it on CD through Anomalous Records.
The album begins convincingly enough in regards to the Claire and Susan mythology as Sanderson has employed the vocal talents of a woman simply identified as Nancy in an ethereal collage of her voice cycling through a mantra of tape delay effects. Yet that is the only reference to anything distinctly feminine on the record, as Sanderson completes the record with variations and repetitions of clattering electronics corroding into grimy noise and smeary tape hiss, not unlike Chris Carter's productions for Throbbing Gristle and less structured than Sanderson's work as the Storm Bugs. Sanderson's liner notes describe the record as "academic rigour married to an inverted pop art aesthetic. For whereas pop art incorporated the cheap intoxications of consumer culture into the supposed lofty rooms of high art, here was an attempt to incorporate the form of high art into the low brutality of DIY electronics." Well stated! It's probably not for everybody, but with the proliferation of CD-R labels doing the exact same thing 20 years later, "Reprint" is a historical gem.
It's been a very, very long time that Philip Sanderson has released anything new. Up until Seal Pool Sounds, the last recordings for Sanderson date back to 1982! During the late '70s and early '80s, Sanderson had been very active in the Britian's DIY cassette culture, producing music as the Storm Bugs (with Steven Ball) and as Susan Thomas & Clare Vesay (whose fictional femininity caused a minor bout of controversy between Sanderson and Cherry Red records). He also collaborated frequently with David Jackman who at that time had yet to form his seminal drone-scrape project Organum. Many of these recordings emerged on Sanderson's own Snatch Tapes; and some of those original cassettes have slowly been reissued in recent years. In the mid-'80s, Sanderson made a stylistic jump to film and installation, offering an explanation as to his whereabouts during all those years.
Within the murk, hiss, and Frankensteinian electric constructions of his early work on Snatch, there was a peculiar and perverse sense of humor in Sanderson's work. On Seal Pool Sounds, he allows the playful aspects of that sense of humor to occasionally emerge with these much cleaner squiggles, jolts, and drones of electronic sounds. Alternately, a plaintive melancholia hangs upon other abstracted tones and broken rhythms, ending up sounding like more primitive constructions from Mika Vainio's solo work, those Microstoria albums, and even Manhatten Research era Raymond Scott.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Their label Metonymic qualifies Sandoz Lab Technician's "Synaptic Acres" as "fluent jazzish exotica, with undercurrents of 50's noir films that never were, to minutely detailed moments of stillness and beauty." I don't know what the fuck they're talking about. The Sandoz Lab Technicians emerge as one of the more mind-expanding outfits from the fertile New Zealand free noise community, which has also spawned The Dead C, RST, Flies Inside The Sun, Surface Of The Earth, etc. With freeranging sonic investigations with guitars, feedback, drums, sax, melodica, and bells (just to name a few of the many sounds uttered on this album), "Synaptic Acres" is a playful if gritty album akin to playing in the mud as a kid.
Sandoz Lab Technicians may be the most fucked-up and most freeform out of all of the mind-expanding, free noise New Zealanders that we have championed in the past (i.e. Birchville Cat Motel, Dead C, Omit, Anthony Milton, etc.). That said, Sandoz Lab Technicians haven't been terribly prolific (unlike pretty much everybody else we just mentioned), but they have been consistently way out there when they have managed to record their ramshackle improvisations. The Western Lands is as loose and freeform as you can get, with absolutely nothing resembling a song, a structure, or even the hint of a melody getting in the way of their sonic escapades. Random scrapes and scratches across both guitar and violin aimlessly drift behind a plinky-plonk keyboard smeared with the delay emitting semi-tonal clusters of notes that resemble jazz vibes at their most cosmic or most terminally stoned. Then, inexplicably one of the Technicians sloshes a glass of water around just below the microphone. Weird. SLT work better, however, when eschewing such Fluxus strategies and gravitating towards long-form, heavy amplifier drones dappled with gong crashes. Still, way more obtuse than anything you'll hear from any of those other NZ folks...
After a way too long break, Hidden Shoal return to aQuarius, with two new gems, both from long time aQ faves, the first is the latest from SF dreamdronedrifter Wes Willenbring, reviewed elsewhere on this list, and this right here, the latest from German outfit Sankt Otten, who we originally described as a mix between Bohren And Der Club Of Gore and Portishead (they're often described in the press as the German Portishead), and really Bohren and Portishead, can't do much better than that. But we were excited to hear how these guys might have changed over the last couple years, and in fact, their sound has shifted quite a bit.
At least in the beginning, the murk and the muted minimalism has been replaced by something much more washed out and ethereal, glimmering and dreamlike, the opening track is a weightless swath of gauzy chordal shimmer that leads directly into a deep throbbing bass synth, we were prepared for a descent into darkness, but weirdly, the sound shifts toward something more epic, a chiming gamelan like melody, over warm soaring synths, skittery drums, a sort of laid back droney downtempo shuffle, but laced with a weirdly major key melody.
It's around track three, where the group slip into some serious downtempo trip hop territory, a gorgeous hazy trawl through greyed electronics and blackened ambience, more laid back skitter, thick throbbing bass, and all sorts of sweeping swirling melody, dark and epic and mysterious. But SA continue to defy the German Portishead pigeonhole, by cranking up the tempo, veering into a sort of krautrock by way of Four Tet one minute, whirling Pop Ambience the next, synthy sprawling blissed out prismatic new age the next, over the course of the record slipping back and forth between these various sounds, sometimes melding several at once, a gorgeous, moody sonic journey, from haunting atmospheric darkness, to sun dappled rhythmic mesmer, to spaced out psychedelic synth, to eighties sounding new wave to hushed dreamlike ambience, to creepy slowcore crawl. Awesome stuff.
Before we get into the story behind this disc, let us just start by saying, that not only is this one of our new favorite records, a gorgeous slithery, smokey cross between Bohren And Der Club Of Gore and Portishead, but that it took a whole lot of work to get it into the store and available for sale...
So this has actually happened to us a few times, which either speaks to our naivete, or as we prefer to think a dogged belief in the record album as object, to be held, listened to and loved, and an inability to understand any thoughts to the contrary. Australia's Hidden Shoal Records got in touch with us and was hoping we would check out some of their bands, we did, and got all excited about carrying them at AQ. Until, after we emailed and tried to order some, we were regretfully informed that Hidden Shoal was in fact a digital only label, no lps, no cds, no cassettes, just MP3's. Too bad we thought, as far as we were concerned, though of course we know there are those perfectly happy to download some MP3's. But over the course of many months, and lots of emails back and forth, the label admitted to being interested in actually pressing up cds. We of course encouraged them, because we wanted all our customers to be able to buy and hear this music, but also, because, there's something about the object, the cd or the lp or the 7", the liner notes, looking through the booklet while listening to the music, the feel, even the smell. And sure, it IS all about the music, but that other stuff is part of it too, no matter how much iTunes wants us to think otherwise. Obviously most of you don't need to be told that, otherwise you'd probably not be reading this.
Well, the upshot is, two of our favorite recordings on Hidden Shoal are now finally available on cd, well, cd-r actually. But they are professionally pressed, with full color artwork, printed artwork on the disc, and heck, we'll take cd-r's over MP3s any day. And lots of you seem to prefer cd-r's anyway...
This disc is the latest from German combo Sankt Otten, often considered to be the Portishead of Germany, and sonically, that's not all that far off the mark. Although when we first heard it, we heard a lot of Bohren as well, late period Talk Talk, and maybe a little Tricky and Massive Attack. It all adds up exactly how you might imagine. Slow burning instrumentals, humid and sultry, Morricone-ish guitars drifting in a sea of rumble and shimmer, the bass a slithery serpent of sound, smooth and sexy sometimes, distorted and fuzz drenched at others.
But as with music like this, it's all about two things, the drums, and the atmosphere. And the drums here are perfect. And heck, so is the ambience. The rhythms almost always begin a jazzy skitter, the cymbals sizzling, the snare brushed, occasionally lurching into a more propulsive funk flecked rhythm. A dark lugubrious pulse, dangerous and dimly lit. The drums demarcate a darkened path through back alleys and smoky clubs, everything cloaked in a thick, ominous ambience. Dense sonic swells wrapped around sparse arrangements and moody minor key melodies. More of a jazz vibe than any of the above mentioned bands... but the jazziness oozes into all sorts of gorgeous variations, with the various chunks of dreamy doomy shuffle separated by stretches of Circle like hypnorock or looped Necks style static jazz, or the haunting Sigur Ros like vocals on "Fallen Und Fangen (Johannes Der Laeufer)" draped over soaring super dramatic strings, or even the album closer, "Maerchenwald", which almost sounds like it could be on Kompakt, a grey hued shoegazey drift, with sweeping synths rainy day piano, and a strange techno pulse buried in the mix. Some tracks sound so much like Portishead, they could be lost B-sides or instrumental outtakes, but Sankt Otten manage to imbue even those tracks too with their own stamp, be it an unlikely melody, some Western twang, some strange distorted bass line, spidery atonal synth or an unexpected abstract breakdown. Or as is the case on "Zum Schweigen Verdammt" its flurries of cinematic strings, and super distorted percussive crashes.
It's all just so intensely moody and melancholy, jazzy and dramatic, and so so gorgeous.
She's been on the scene for a few years now, but this is the first we've heard of the intimate and fragile dreamlike sounds of Sanso-Xtro, aka Australian multi-intrumentalist Melissa Agagte, who uses analog synths and electronics to create a fantasy soundtrack for a wander through a mystical forest, a sound that makes us think of folks like Islaja and Paavarhaju, or what it might sound like if Natural Snow Buildings teamed up with Colleen. It's never too precious for its own good, and in fact there's a mesmerizing haunting quality to this album that wraps you in its arms from start to finish. Like a warped music box floating on an empty lake, this is intimate and engaging music at its best!
Another enigma from the cassette underground via Black Horizons. Presumably, this is a contemporary project; and presumably, they / she hail from France (there is a recognizably female voice that appears throughout the album); and presumably, there's a guest appearance from one of the members of the post-industrial outfit Novy Svet. Nope, that's not a lot of context to frame this album, as the sounds within certainly could have come out way back when, on Inner X, Dead Man's Curve, or any of those Rising From The Red Sands compilations. Santa Espina provide us with 16 tracks, mostly of loop based material whose antiquated murkiness and dour drone-pulsations seems to be a codeine-sloshed bout of method acting that might have aspired to the Legendary Pink Dots / Edward Ka-Spel strategies of chemical sound, if Santa Espina weren't so woozy. When the French lady vocals do come into the mix, they are whispered almost like dreams or forgotten witchy incantations, onto a microcassette recorder and layered amidst various states of damp tape detritus. Limited to 100 copies. And as always, some super fancy packaging to boot...
Released on the local ambient label The Foundry, Dean Santomieri's "Boy Beneath The Sea" starts off pleasantly enough with slowly strummed Godspeed / Tarentel guitar riffs complemented by vaguely New Age-ish chimes and polished digital sheen. But Santomieri marrs the atmosphere with an extended monologue about "wonder, fear, guilt, impotence, love, anguish and freedom as uttered from
